


A Little Wind Through the Bramble Bushes

by Isis



Category: Knight's Fee - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Prophetic Dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-01 11:09:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4017502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis/pseuds/Isis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ancret watches the D'Aguillons come to Dean, and watches them leave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Wind Through the Bramble Bushes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [opalmatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/opalmatrix/gifts).



> Thanks to Riventhorn for a stellar beta.
> 
> The timeline is cobbled together from that in the Wiki and my own timeline for Knight's Fee that I put together for an earlier story in this fandom.

It was not long after the first blood of her womanhood came upon her that the dreams began. Three and three and three it always was, bullocks or hounds or elm trees, and after the last Ancret went to her mother.

"Three elm trees," said her mother thoughtfully. She, and therefore Ancret, was descended from the Dark Folk, who had lived in this land before anyone else, and she was the one they all came to when a hurt needed mending or an omen needed understanding. "It is a powerful number, three, holy to our gods and to theirs." She sketched the sacred spiral with her finger on the wooden table before them. "The earth, the sea, and the sky. The father, son, and spirit."

Ancret frowned. She and her mother did not follow Christ; there was no reason for the gods of the church-going folk to visit her. Yet her dreams seemed to hold more of their symbols than those of their own gods. "That is what I see. When it was hounds, it was a puppy, and a young hunting-hound, and an old dog curled by the fire-side. I like the old dog the best," she confided. "The puppy wanted me to play with him, and the hunting-hound cared only about the scent of fox. But the old dog sat by me and was my friend."

"And the trees?" 

"A sapling, and a tall tree with a spreading canopy of green leaves, and an ancient elm this big around." She held out her hands to show the tremendous girth of the old tree. In her dream she had rested her head peacefully against its trunk. 

Her mother considered this. She, too, had dreamed: of a rider who came into their valley and dismounted there in the yard of the manor house that had lain empty this last year and more, after their old Thegn Wulfthere and his sons had ridden off to the battle of Hastings and not returned. Around him the fields waxed ripe with bursting grain and the trees grew heavy with fruit, as his boots turned to spreading roots and his body became the trunk of a sturdy tree.

"It is in my mind that we have had the same dream," she finally said. "I do not think the manor will stay empty long."

She was right, for only a few days later, young Sir Everard d'Aguillon came to Dean to take possession of the holding. A Norman master for a Saxon vale, but he gravely shook the hands of those whose kin had fought at Hastings, though he called the battle Senlac, and maybe he had killed those men himself. But it seemed to Ancret that he settled into the vale as though he had been born to it, and the people were glad enough to have the manor occupied again, even if it be by a Norman lord. Perhaps it was that he brought his lady and their son with him, for that made Dean not the prize of a conquering lord, but a home for a family, to live on the land.

And the d'Aguillons did much to make themselves liked and respected by the villeins. Sir Everard's lady was a sweet and pleasant woman who brought order to the garden that had been all grown over with brambles, making it her own with beds of lemon balm and thyme, and tiny, sweet strawberries that burst on the tongue like pure distilled sunlight. Their young son was of an age with the smith's boy, and they climbed trees together, or built castles from the mud on the river-bank, and later they would come to Ancret's mother's bothy with dirty hands and faces, hoping she might give them a bit of bread with bramble syrup.

The boys had mostly been beneath Ancret's notice, for they were children while she was a woman, even if it was still a new thing to her. But something in young Richard's manner touched her heart, and later she had asked her mother why it was that she felt sad when she looked at him. "Even when he is laughing, his fingers and face sticky with syrup."

"It is because you see what will become of him."

"But I don't! I don't see anything!"

"Look into your heart," her mother said. "Look into the shapes you see in the fire, and into the stories your dreams tell you."

Ancret pondered her mother's words. When she'd first looked at the boy, he'd briefly appeared insubstantial, as though he were made of mist rather than flesh, as though a shadow blurred his edges. It was only for moment, and then he was a boy like any other. "At first he seemed a ghost," she said hesitantly, hoping it wouldn't sound foolish.

But her mother nodded. "A ghost passing through the valley like the wind, here and gone. He will not hold Dean, the poor boy."

"But his father is the Lord of Dean. He will come into his inheritance when Sir Everard dies." The words of protest felt strange in her mouth. These were things that would happen in days and days far to come, a long way from where they were now. And she did not like the thought of Sir Everard d'Aguillon dying. He was a young, vigorous man, and more, he was kind to her and to her mother. Her mother was called to the hall whenever one of their people fell ill or was to be delivered of a child, and they did not call her witch, despite the churchman's mutterings against her, but thanked her for the good she did them. And if her mother was busy in the village and Ancret went up instead, they treated her with the gravity due a wise-woman, not as a girl barely old enough to bear a child herself. His wife made room in her garden for the herbs Ancret's mother advised her to plant, and they did not insist that Ancret and her mother go to the church to worship their Christ. All this, she knew, was d'Aguillon's doing. She liked him well, and did not want to think of his death.

Her mother looked at her, one eyebrow raised, and of a sudden Ancret knew that the strangeness she had felt came from a deep knowledge she could not explain, but nevertheless knew for truth. Richard would die before Sir Everard and never come into his birthright. She had seen it in the shadow that lay over him as he crammed freshly-baked bannock into his laughing mouth.

* * *

Twenty years on it had come to pass, just as her mother had said. Richard had died in 1088, in the Rebellion, leaving five-year-old Bevis an orphan. Bevis' mother, never strong, had died within a few short weeks of the birthing of him, despite the herb draughts Ancret prepared, the massages she gave her, the soft words she spoke into the dying woman's ear. Richard had held his wife's hand as a wet nurse tried to soothe his squalling son.

"She is gone," said Ancret gently, from the other side of the bed. Richard rose and crossed to where Bevis fretted at the unfamiliar breast, and brushed across the sparse fine dark hair on his son's head, then left the room. 

The woman looked over to Ancret uncertainly. "He is unhappy with the teat."

Ancret stood, smoothing her skirts. The women were already coming in to clean and wrap the body in the Christian way; the priest had been there a few days before and had bent to the bedside to hear a confession whispered brokenly into his ear. "I will take him," she said. "Give him to me."

"I am not sure I should do that," said the woman, hunching her back as though to shelter Bevis in her ample chest, and Ancret felt a flare of anger. Did the woman think she had not done everything possible to save the boy's mother? Did the woman not trust her ways? 

"I would not hurt him!"

"You have no milk," said the woman. 

It had been no judgment on her, only a practical statement of truth, she realized. "If he will not take the teat, he must get his milk some other way," she explained. "I have a she-goat, and a twist of cloth for him to suck." And a heart that yearned to care for a child. Her own womb, she knew, was barren, so it had seemed the natural thing to do, to care for this young lord who would one day have Dean for his birthright. She moved up to the Hall to be with Bevis. It was she who told him forthrightly but gently that his father was not coming home again.

In her dreams she'd seen the tall tree felled by a woodsman's axe, though she cried out and reached for the man's arm, trying to stop him. But though she might see hints of things to come, she had no power to change them. Not in the world of dreams, not in the world of men. 

She loved the dark-haired Norman lordling who was her foster-son despite the knowledge she had held secret from his birth that he, too, would be a ghost in the valley. In one dream she had seen the sapling wither before it came into flower, before it could bear the fruit which would hold the seeds from which a new tree might spring. Bevis might hold Dean for a time, but he would be the last of the d'Aguillons to do so. 

But there had been a new tree all the same. One night, while Sir Everard d'Aguillon was off in France, a motley squirrel had run through her dream. It had run down the trunk of the great elm and scurried across the stump of the young tree, and there, beside the elm sapling, it had dropped an acorn. The acorn had taken root, and thrust its own sapling questing toward the sky, growing with the magical speed only to be found in dreams and visions. It was not a mighty oak, not yet, but when the old elm fell, it would be ready. The two saplings bent toward each other in the strange breeze that blew in her dream, their leaves brushing against each other, oak and elm, a quiet susurrus. The day would come when she would know that oak.

D'Aguillon returned, bringing a child with him; and she thought upon this, wondering who the squirrel might have been, to send such an acorn from France. Then came the day that Bevis and Randal stood before her at the entrance to her turf-roofed bothy, bruised and bloody and fierce in their friendship, and it was all clear to her in an instant. So this battered pup was to be the Lord of Dean. After seeing to his hurts, she eyed him curiously. 

"You're no Norman, like Bevis my fosterling," she said. "And no Saxon either, despite your hair. What are you, that Sir Everard brought home with him?"

"My mother was a Saxon lady, and my father was a Breton man-at-arms."

Breton. Briton. The old blood had returned to its old home. 

She gave them barley cakes with dark, sweet syrup, the bramble syrup she made as her mother had made it. The berries she had collected from the Hill of Gathering, and mashed with a little water in a pot over a slow fire. There was no need for honey, the fruit was sweet enough, and after it had simmered for a while it became thick and dark and sticky. A bit of it came off on her finger as she handed the cakes to the boys, and when she brought her finger to her mouth to lick it off the past came back to her. 

It had been years and more than years since her mother had been buried, but she heard her mother's voice in her head as though she were standing beside her at the mouth of the bothy. _A ghost passing through the valley_ _like the wind_ _, here and gone._

She had known in her heart that Bevis would be the last of the d'Aguillon line to hold Dean, and it was a heavy weight, that knowledge, a sadness that had lived in her from the moment he had squalled, red-faced, in her arms. He was a son to her, and the d'Aguillons were family to her. Yet now the sadness had eased, just a little, for she knew that this Randal would be a fine steward for the vale, and a fitting one. In him mingled the true heritage of the land: the Britons who had held it before the coming of Rome, the Saxons who had come as raiders and stayed as farmers. And there was a little of the old blood in him, aye, that of the Dark People who had been the first of all. 

She watched them as they left the clearing to cross the fields back to the Hall, berry stains on their faces where the blood had been. The slanting rays of the twilight sun lit them so that they were only dark boy-shapes limned in light. _I shall always be here for your finding – while you need me_ , she had told Bevis. She would be here for her foster-son, and for her great friend Sir Everard. Randal would have to make his way without her. But she expected he would do well enough. Dean would do well enough. The land would return to its own.

* * *

It was just past the turn of the season and the crossing of the sun overhead, the harvest celebration. In the church, old Adam Clerk was lighting candles made from her beeswax for Michaelmas Eve. 

How she knew that Bevis had fallen, she couldn't say. It was a change in the scent of the wind, a shift in the color of the clouds streaking the sky. It was as though she had been listening with only half an ear to the birds chattering in the forest, and then one had fallen silent. But Ancret had known it was coming, for the day Bevis had ridden off to battle, she had expected her monthly courses, and they had not come. The first d'Aguillon had ridden into Dean when she had become a woman, and the last would die as she became a crone. Her foster-son was gone, his father was gone, old d'Aguillon was gone. They needed her no more, and so Dean had no more hold on her. It was north she would go, to see if any more of her mother's people still lived on this Norman land.

She had been in the garden gathering herbs, and she brought her basket back with her and set it on the table. More than she needed or could carry with her, but others would take them as they needed, nothing would go to waste. In her bothy, everything was tidy and in its place, so there was little to do save put out the fire. She wrapped what was left of her morning loaf in a cloth, and a few bundles of herbs that might be useful, and stepped out of the doorway for the last time. She took up the stout walking stick that rested against the wall by the door, and struck out, across the Hill of Gathering, away from Dean.


End file.
